An experiment in end-of-life care: Tapping AI’s cold calculus to nudge the most human of conversations
The daily email that arrived in physician Samantha Wang’s inbox at 8 a.m., just before morning rounds, contained a list of names and a warning: These patients are at high risk of dying within the next year.
One name that turned up again and again belonged to a man in his 40s, who had been admitted to Stanford University’s hospital the previous month with a serious viral respiratory infection. He was still much too ill to go home, but Wang was a bit surprised that the email had flagged him among her patients least likely to be alive in a year’s time.
